what is a partogram?

Thanks to moms tinfoil hat http://momstinfoilhat.wordpress.com/I found this great piece of research http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0002-9378/PIIS0002937808007758.pdf

The authors take a look at a large number of common interventions during labor and delivery and determine if they are supported by evidence or not.

One of the things they looked was using a partogram. Now this is a term I had never heard before. Naturally I had to google it. I don't know if this is the best page to define the term http://staff.um.edu.mt/csav1/lectures/partogram.pdf but it sure has a lot of charts. As best as i understand a partogram is basically a chart with an "action line" and anything that falls into the range of the "action line" requires some kind of action. Something like the Friedman's Curve.

Barbara over at NavalGazingMidwife http://navelgazingmidwife.squarespace.com/ kindly posted this link to an article that gives a good explaination of that http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/273053-overview

Something I'm going to have to learn more about for sure.

If you're interested they concled that the evidence is insufficient to recommend routine use of the partogram.